1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to electronic messaging such as email.
2. State of the Art
The adoption of email has occurred at an unprecedented pace. Of routine computer users, most now have or soon will have an email address. Many have more than one email address, e.g., one for work and another for home. Email offers unparalleled convenience of written communication.
Besides ubiquitous email, another powerful trend is wireless access via a variety of wireless devices, e.g., cell phones, pagers, hand-held computers such as Palm and Windows CE devices, etc. Service-specific email gateways allow an email message to be sent from the Internet to a particular wireless device. In the case of a Sprint PCS phone, for example, an email may be addressed to #@sprintpcs.com, where # represents the telephone number of the phone. Despite this capability, wireless messaging is greatly complicated by the fact that a person may have multiple wireless devices, and that at a given time, the sender has no way of knowing the person""s whereabouts or preferred method of message delivery at that time, let alone the address specifics pertaining to each gateway.
For example, the person may be in the office, in which case desktop email would be preferred, on the road staying at a hotel, in which case cell phone email might be preferred, or on the road away from a major metropolitan area, in which case pager email (which has nationwide coverage in the US) might be preferred. This situation, referred to herein as the xe2x80x9cmultiple email box conundrum,xe2x80x9d is illustrated in FIG. 1. An intended recipient B of an electronic message may receive electronic messages through one or more wired devices and/or one or more wireless devices, which may include some or all of the following: an ISP mail account, a free web mail account, a PDA mail account, a cell phone subscription, and a pager subscription. In each instance, email is delivered through a different server or gateway connected to the Internet, i.e., a ISP mail server, a portal mail server, a PDA mail server, a cellular gateway and a paging gateway. A message originator A may, at various times, use some or all the devices mentioned to send an electronic message. In the multiple email box conundrum, the message originator needs to know which email address to use to reach the user. In turn, the recipient must monitor all accounts and devices to keep track of critical information.
Furthermore, in the case of a wireless network gateway, the wireless gateway will typically strip off any email attachments, usually without any notification to the user.
Note that, in FIG. 1, wired devices may be stand-alone or LAN-based. In the case of stand-alone devices, connection to the Internet is typically dial-up access through an ISP. In the case of a LAN-based device, a server on the LAN may be connected to the Internet through an ISP or directly to the Internet without the involvement of an ISP.
Neither ISPs nor wireless providers are well-positioned to offer a complete solution to the electronic messaging problem. ISPs are primarily focused on new customer acquisition and often do not have enough users to attract wireless partners. In the case of wireless providers, users are generally unwilling to switch their primary email address. And wireless vendors are generally unable to integrate with existing email services.
With the widespread adoption of email, there has also occurred the proliferation of junk email, or xe2x80x9cspam.xe2x80x9d Currently, of the hundreds of millions of email messages sent each day, about 30% of those messages may be expected to be junk email. FIG. 2 illustrates xe2x80x9cspammingxe2x80x9d of the user of FIG. 1. Various companies (e.g., Brightmail Inc. of San Francisco, Calif.) have addressed the problem of junk email by providing email filtering software that attempts to identify and discard junk email. Typically, such software resides on a destination email server. Such a solution does not scale well; i.e., installing and maintaining email filtering software on email servers grows increasingly difficult as the number of email servers multiplies.
Because of the resources required to install and maintain an email server, various companies have emerged offering email outsourcing in which the email server is provided by a third party outside the organization. Email outsourcing off-loads the responsibility for providing and maintaining email service without necessitating any change in domain or email addresses. Email is retrieved from an off-site email server provided and maintained by the email outsourcing company. One example of an email outsourcing company is United Messaging Inc. of Malvern, Pa. Despite such arrangements, the multiple email box conundrum and the junk email problems remain.
Accordingly, a need exists for a scalable, transparent solution to the junk email problem. Also, a need exists for a unified messaging solution, embracing wireless messaging, that addresses the foregoing drawbacks of the prior art.
The present invention, generally speaking, provides for a unified electronic messaging solution in which individual, configurable user profiles are used to route and deliver electronic messages from various sources, wired and/or wireless, to various destinations, wired and/or wireless, in various formats. For example, the subject line of an electronic message may be sent to a user""s pager, while an abbreviated version of the message is sent to the user""s PDA having wireless-connectivity and the full electronic message is sent to the user""s work. The unified electronic messaging solution may be deployed by ISPs within the existing Internet infrastructure. More preferably, scalability is greatly enhanced by providing (e.g., as part of a Network Operations Center, or NOC), an intermediate server that precedes a destination server on an electronic message delivery path. The electronic messaging solution allows provides for performance of a variety of value-added services, such as junk email filtering, recipient-directed message routing, including wireless delivery to any of a variety of wireless devices, rich media services such as attachment preview, etc. In the latter embodiment, the operator of the intermediate server therefore functions as an Electronic Messaging Service Provider (EMSP). Preferably, the intermediate server is inserted into the electronic message delivery path by changing a DNS (Domain Name Server) entry pertaining to the destination email server. As a result, no new hardware or software is required for users or ISPs. Because a single NOC including the intermediate server can serve far-flung geographic regions, scalability is achieved. The ease of inserting the intermediate server into the electronic message delivery path enables self enrollment by ISPs (Internet Service Providers) in a cooperative services program (that may involve revenue sharing), enabling effective penetration to second-tier ISPs, which are extremely numerous. In one embodiment, junk email, instead of being deleted without notification, is posted to a user-accessible web site where it is kept for a period of time. A user therefore has an opportunity to verify that the diverted messages are indeed junk email. Through the web site, a user may create a profile governing the forwarding of messages. Preferably, the web site is accessible both from the desktop and from the wireless devices themselves, enabling real-time update of the profile by the user or by agent software.